Twitter serves up ideas from its followers

Companies big and small monitor Twitter to find out what their customers like and what they want changed. Twitter does the same.

It started two years ago as a bare-bones service, offering little more than the ability to post 140-character messages. Then, it outsourced its idea generation to its users. The company watches how people use the service and which ideas catch on. Then its engineers turn the ideas into new features.

In the next several weeks, Twitter users will discover two new features, Lists and Retweets, that had the same user-generated beginnings.

“Twitter’s smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, ‘Gee, let’s not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let’s outsource design to them,’ ” said Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at MIT and author of the book “Democratising Innovation.”

Economists have long thought that producers — the people making products and running companies — are naturally the ones coming up with new ideas, Professor Von Hippel said. In fact, he said, consumers often come up with ideas for products, and companies wait on the sidelines to see if they have mass appeal.

Technology companies have been the most active in relying on others to innovate for them. This is in large part because the Internet lets people exchange ideas easily and rapidly with large groups, and computing tools let people design new products cheaply.The photo-sharing site Flickr started as a small part of a big online game. When the founders realised that the photo-sharing feature was more popular than the game, they scrapped the game and built Flickr. Open-source software companies leave innovation up to users, and companies like Bug Labs let people build their own hardware.

Start-ups are more likely to take this approach because they are still defining their products and have the flexibility to change direction. It can be much harder for older companies to make the shift, both culturally and logistically.

And some big, nontechnology companies are embracing user-generated innovation. Ford Motor noticed that people were modifying Sync, its voice-activated system for playing music and getting directions. Ford has invited university students to come up with new features for the in-car system. Lego started a site called Design byME, where fans can use Lego design software to create their own models. Lego then sells the designs, effectively offloading the design cost to fans.

Twitter, though, may rely on user-generated innovation more than any other company. Early on, Twitter users started referring to others by typing the @ symbol before their name. For example, Biz Stone, a Twitter founder, recently wrote about his wife: “Wow, @Livia just took her homemade vegan lasagna out of the oven — I’m hungry!” “That one really took us by surprise,” said Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive and a founder. Since then, Twitter has added a section to the site where people can see every time they are mentioned with the @ symbol. It began hyperlinking the names so others can click on them to see the subject’s profile page.

Twitter also gets ideas from the software developers who build Twitter applications. It was not focused on letting people search Twitter messages until a start-up, Summize, created a search engine. Twitter bought Summize in 2008, and search is now a central part of the company, which signed search partnerships with Microsoft and Google last week.

“Most companies or services on the Web start with wrong assumptions about what they are and what they’re for,” Williams said. “Twitter struck an interesting balance of flexibility and malleability that allowed users to invent uses for it that weren’t anticipated.” But it was a learning process for the company. The founders did not like several user-generated Twitter features at first, but accepted them once they saw that others were adopting them, Williams said. When people started referring to Twitter posts as “tweets,” Twitter resisted until a few months ago, when it applied for a trademark on the term.

In 2007, Chris Messina, an early Twitter user, came up with another idea, inspired by a convention used on other Web sites, to mark conversations about a certain topic with the # symbol. “I begged and pleaded for them to support this feature, and they said, ‘No, it’s only for nerds, no one will get it,’” said Messina, an open-source advocate who runs a technology consulting firm, Citizen Agency.

But Twitter users caught on fast. Many conferences, for example, announce the so-called hash tag at the start of the event so attendees can mark all their posts the same way and people can search Twitter for everything written on the conference.

Now, Twitter hyperlinks the hash tags so readers can click and see all the other posts on a topic. Many of these appear in the list of trending topics on Twitter, another new addition. Twitter could add other hash tag features, like more clearly grouping all the posts about a certain event, Williams said.

Up next are two new features that were also inspired by users. One is called Lists, available to a small group now and to all Twitter users soon. People can create lists of all the tweets written by Hollywood celebrities or politicians, for example. Lists will help new users figure out whom to follow and help avid users filter their overflowing streams of posts, Williams said.

The idea was inspired by those who were confused about how to use Twitter and by ideas from software developers, he said. TweetDeck, for example, makes a Twitter desktop application that lets users group posts based on who wrote them. Lists also echo Follow Friday, another feature that users invented. Every Friday, Twitter users write posts recommending other people to follow on Twitter.

Also, when Twitter users wanted to send a post by another Twitter user to their own set of followers, they wrote “retweet,” which they shortened to RT. Twitter is now privately testing an official retweet feature that will fix some of the problems with retweets by eliminating redundant posts, clarifying who wrote the original post and preventing people from changing other people’s words, Williams said.

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